Your project seeks to improve the delivery of healthcare
- There is a "know-do" gap, meaning you've identified a gap between the care that we know patients should be receiving (i.e. best practice), and what they're actually receiving (i.e. what we're actually doing).
- You've discovered inefficiency or waste, delays, inequities, or bad patient/family/professional experiences. In these situations, QI methods can help you make care more efficient, timely, equitable, and person-centered.
Contrast the above with projects that seek to examine the factors that lead to certain clinical outcomes, explore the characteristics of a new diagnostic test, or evaluate the risk and benefits of new treatments. Such projects require clinical research and statistical expertise that is not part of the QI Project Accelerator service.
At least some of the data you need for your project can be found in Epic databases
Often, QI projects benefit from a multi-modal measurement strategy, involving both quantitative and qualitative information. QI Project Accelerator's expert analyst will help you pull and organize data you need from Epic, but may not have access to other databases. If you plan to conduct chart review or systematically collect qualitative information (e.g. surveys), you may want to use REDCap. The QI Project Accelerator service can direct you towards resources for learning REDCap, but you will be responsible for building your own surveys and managing the resulting data.
Your analytical needs are limited to common QI statistical methods
These methods include grounded theory, thematic analyses, descriptive statistics, simple comparisons, or data trended over time such as run charts, statistical process control charts, or interrupted time series. Support for more complex statistical methods such as multivariable regression is not included in QI Project Accelerator.